Lyrics as Your AIM Away Message: An Appreciation

While surely there were ways to broadcast your emotions to people who didn’t care about them before AOL Instant Messenger, the chat client served, at the turn of the millennium, as the premiere medium for cryptic slander, cries for attention, and above all, lyrics from whichever song described why you were crying into a bottle of 99 Bananas. From Brand New to Fiona Apple, from Staind to Fall Out Boy, the AIM away message became a repository for song lyrics that could define broadly why life sucks or rules. Which came first: lyrics or AIM away messages? They are so inextricably linked I’m not even sure.

AOL announced today that it would be closing AIM for good in December. This is fine because no one has used it seriously since maybe The Black Parade, or since G-Chat took over with its tiny away messages that eventually disappeared with the onset of the modern social media shitscape as we know it. There are no more away messages because, you know, are we ever even away anymore? Ostensibly, we’re always here, online, posting messages. Picture, if you will, a primordial time when being “away” from the internet was an entirely normal thing that didn’t need to be proclaimed as some kind of sanctimonious spiritual hiatus. I could just go out and post something like, “teen drinking is very bad... yo I got a fake i.d. though! tap the celly.”

That was the gist of the AIM away message, one of the first, most popular ways of establishing a shorthand emotional connection with people online through music. I don’t exclusively mean to wax nostalgic here, though I do have a tab open of a message board post from 2003 titled, “Way to have AIM display what song I'm currently listening to in Winamp?” and my body is filled with the kind of spiky, anxious feeling that comes when you see a bottle of CK One or hear the original, acoustic version of “Hands Down.” Remember the sound of the door opening when someone from your “buddy list” came online? Just listen to this collection of AIM sound effects and see if you don’t seize up recalling a teary fight with a significant other as those sounds rang out in increasing chaos. Remember how you could warn people and they would have a warning level? (Imagine wielding that power on Twitter today, people trying to get their warning level to 69 percent.) My Pavlovian response to all of this seems tied to those throes of adolescence and sharing, for the first time, how I was feeling over the internet, most often through lyrics.

Anthropologists of this generation should ask the government to fund a study of which lyrics were posted to AIM away messages the most. Were they largely emo lyrics, tied to the genre’s ascent in popular culture? Or would it reveal that the majority were whatever was popular on “TRL” at the moment? Would it include that WhatevsAmy2299 wrote, “i’ll be your #1 with a ~*~*bullet*~*~” or that xBurtonBenx declared, “‘tears gone cold i wonder why’ --eminiem” or that JimmYEaTWareZ lamented, “hands down this is the best day i can ever remember…………...i wish.” During the peak of AIM away messages, I was full of emotions and carried them with me always, like a Nalgene bottle. And before I had Facebook and Twitter to use as curatorial devices for carving out a #brand for myself, there was the away message where I could define myself—until I got back—with a simple “God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life.”

The cultural tradition of posting song lyrics without context has not abated, becoming a language in and of itself on Twitter. After the release of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, Pitchfork contributor Liz Pelly compiled a story for the erstwhile Boston Phoenix about teenagers tweeting every lyric on the album within just 24 hours. Listening to a Drake song or a Beyoncé album for the first time requires a kind of metatextual labor where you are seeking the one lyric that could be tweeted, that could become a meme, that could be the building block for a new cultural language. You could retweet people saying “With the birds I share this lonely view,” or “It’s all about the he-says, she-says bullshit,” or “We’re all stars now in the dope show” for days on end and you’d still never get to the first time someone tweeted it, borne from the same primal impulse that drove us to put up away messages. A lyric out of context creates, immediately, a stronger connection between two strangers based on a mutual feeling: Yes, user, I know that song, and we are all stars now in the dope show.

When I used AIM, under the screen name blockrockinbeets, my most popular away message was a Decemberists lyric: “I am nothing of a builder, but here I dreamt I was an architect.” Now, look: It is scientifically unfathomable to even imagine what kind of shame-free, conscious-free world I inhabited in the early ’00s while I was feeling out how to express who I was on the internet for the first time. It was gangly, uncomfortable, too honest, too earnest, but wasn’t that what this little box was for? To tell the truth about what you were feeling? That’s what the AIM away message seemed to me at the time, and, in some form, the tradition of the little box carries on today, albeit with more self-conscious caveats. So long AIM, or rather: ~*~*so long and goodnight, so long not goodnight*~*~